We started in 1986 with seven teams and expanded to nine teams the next year.
We currently have eight teams, six of which have been with us from the very beginning.
We are a 4x4 AL only league and apart from technological advances have not changed the rules significantly since day one.
Anybody out there been doing it longer?
I’m in a league that started in 1987, with a group of 12 guys who all worked together. Most of them left the company during the 90s, but the league was a great way for them all to keep in touch and have an excuse to get together a couple of times a year.
That’s really impressive. My first league was the one here at the SDMB, back in like 2002.
I’m one of those that has to find a new league every season. I’ve never been in a baseball league that lasted even two seasons! I’ve been playing since '99. To have one league going since '86 or '87 is really impressive. Was the transition to online scoring a big deal for those leagues? And before online leagues, was the commissioner responsible for scoring every team?
As a slight hijack, has anyone been a part of a fantasy league that lasted more than, say, five seasons, and none of the owners knew each other offline? You’d have to retain more than half the members from a previous season in order to count, I think. I never have, in any sport.
I’d say that applies to the SDMB leagues. We’ve been going strong for quite some time now, and I don’t know any of these bastards.
On-line scoring was a very big deal! In the old days, I used the database feature of Lotus Symphony to do the stats. They had to be entered manually every month from the USA Today that reported only on Tuesdays.
Fortunately, team changes could only be made once a month, when a player came in I had to enter his beginning stats as a negative so that the end of month stats netted out to his totals for just that month.
It wasn’t until about 2000 that we found a site to track our players and stats. Even then we would cut and paste reports into a spreadsheet to get the overall results.
Only this year did we go to a completely automatic service. Actually, I have to qualify that, since one of our owners refuses to use a computer we still have the Commissioner manage the teams from transactions that are submitted by email.
Man, I couldn’t even imagine playing fantasy sports without an online interface. I tend to overmanage my teams, meaning that I’m accessing them every single day and making changes every single day. Waiting a month for updates would kill me!
The owner that refuses to use a computer, how does he do in the league? I find it hard to believe he could keep up with the day to day changes without being online to see them. The newspaper(s) around here don’t print that sort of stuff.
He doesn’t do as well as he used to.
However, we still pretty much limit transactions to once a month. Even in the old days it seems like he was less active than most.
Just this year, we started allowing a team to activate any of its three reserve players as of the 15th. Starting on the 15th, transactions are made by email on a FCFS basis, but the players picked up still don’t become active until the next month.